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Thursday, January 16, 2014

White-breasted Nuthatch

This is another of our little birds of winter. Like chickadees, nuthatches are year-round residents here. It is always a pleasure to see one hitching down the trunk of a tree, head-first.

The White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis) is the largest of the four North American nuthatch species. Their habitat is deciduous and mixed deciduous-coniferous forests and treed residential areas (that's me, waving hands).Pete Dunne describes this bird as "a chunky, neckless, child's fist-sized wind-up toy of a bird...."

Nuthatches get their common name from their habit of jamming large seeds and nuts into tree bark, then whacking them with their sharp bill to
“hatch” out the seed from the inside.

White-breasted Nuthatches store food in cache sites with each storage place containing only one type of food.

Nuthatches do not use their tails for stability as do woodpeckers and Brown Creepers. Instead, one foot is used to brace the bird against the tree, the other foot holds onto the bark.

The photos in my posts are my own, except where otherwise attributed. Please don't use any without my permission. Thanks.

Almost Daily Chatter

Friday, May 9, 2014

I guess it's about time I piled up the dry sticks, wadded a bit of paper in there and rekindled this little old blog....

I actually went out birding yesterday. I mean, getting out of my car and walking for hours in parks filled with singing birds. It was nice. Really nice.

Many Yellow-rumped and Orange-crowned Warblers here at the moment. We aren't in the mass warbler migration route farther east. We get a few stragglers, certainly anything is possible in the trees along the river.

We're to have another lovely day before yet another cold front moves in. I have a ton of things to do around the place, but I'm going to desert home and blindcat and go off to look for birds.